Royalty-free (HD) Sound Effect Libraries

Vintage Telephones

About the Sound Effects Library

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Vintage Telephones SFX library contains 244 sounds extracted from 10 historic, rotary dial devices designed between the 1880s and 1980s. Inside, you’ll find three common ringing patterns (used in the USA, Australia, and Europe) for each telephone type, handset pickups/set downs, number dials 1-0, hook toggles, as well as single ringings with natural long ring decays to design your own ring timings according to your project needs.

In addition to the standard telephone sounds, we captured some experimental ones, which were generated by feeding the devices with random low frequencies, thus producing some really weird mechanical rattles, buzzes, glitches, and unusual bell ringings.

Below, are just a few of these sounds included, in the hope that they could serve you as inspiration or even a foundation for new, designed sounds.

All sounds were recorded in mono, using an AKG C314 as an overhead mic, in close perspective, plus two contact microphones attached to different spots on the body of each device, to capture all the vibrations caused by the mechanical bell and dial systems.

All recording sessions have been carried out in an acoustically treated room. We recorded from a close perspective to provide you dry and solid material to apply your own amount of reverb or any other effect in post-production or sound design project.

Well grounded folder structure, ease of use

The library is organized in ten folders, one per telephone type, starting with the oldest device.

Detailed metadata embedded

Each sound has detailed Soundminer metadata, that can be read by various applications and services, making them very easy to find and edit.